Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  “It’s all right, Pete Red Crow. That came from a release deep within,” Chad said. His instinct was right: something needed to be said. Hands shot up from men who had more to share. Chad sensed the mood-shift, and thought that it might be wise to calm things down while he still had control of the group. “It’s time to break for lunch,” he said. “We’ll pick up where we left off when we reassemble. But first let us thank our brother Thanh, a true keeper of the poetic flame, who has graced us with the gifts of purifying fire, solace, and wisdom.”

  The men heartily applauded, but then a bearded man in a wheelchair festooned with ribbons raised his hand and said, “Chad, I don’t think thanks is enough. We need a raising up.”

  Ever since Chad had introduced the ribbons, my friend had watched the proceedings with an increasingly quizzical expression. He’d let the ribbons pass him by and seemed utterly bewildered by the dance and the weeping that followed. I suspected that he’d agreed to the conference with no idea as to what the Men’s Movement was about. As the men in the circle began to drum and then rose and pressed in on him, a sudden fear flashed in his eyes and he shouted, “I have bad knees!” The circle collapsed in on him and he disappeared beneath a scrum of half-naked bodies. I could hear them whispering, “You are my brother, Thanh … you have touched my heart … you have touched my soul.” Then, borne by their uplifted hands, he seemed to levitate above us. Around each knee a red ribbon had been tied into a bow.

  * * *

  Essays on the conspicuous theme of wounds in Hemingway are common, but so far as I know, there’s only that one essay about waiting. And once it is pointed out, you see it everywhere. There’s the cynical Italian major of “In Another Country,” a noted fencer who endures the futile rehabilitation of his mutilated hand. There are stories that are studies in the word pati, to suffer—the root in both patient and patience—like “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which an old waiter prays, Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name …

  Even as a young writer, Hemingway had a knack for portraying old men, not unlike certain actors who make a career of it—Hal Holbrook doing Twain—though I doubt that even Holbrook could play an aging Papa better than Hemingway played himself. It’s fitting that The Old Man and the Sea got him the Nobel Prize. That book is about waiting, too, but then what fishing story isn’t? Moby-Dick is waiting sustained over a thrashing sea of pages. That’s the problem with the insight about waiting: you have to ask, Why single out Hemingway? Think of waiting as measured by the interminable winters in Chekhov, or by the ticking of clocks in bureaucratic offices at the dead ends of the maze of cobbled streets in Kafka’s Prague. Prague, one of those cities that like London is presided over by a clock.

  Limiting the catalogue to just a sample of the writers overlapping Hemingway’s time, there’s Gatsby’s green dock light waiting in darkness and Newland Archer in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, longing for another woman during twenty-five years of loveless marriage; Winesburg, Ohio, a masterpiece about waiting, an entire community stranded in the stasis of secret lives, yearning for something mysterious and unsayable beneath the cover of night; Joyce’s Dubliners, with its phantasmal patron saint of waiting, the tubercular Michael Furey of “The Dead”; Katherine Mansfield’s heroines waiting for their lives to begin; the passengers on Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, waiting for their baggage-ridden lives to change as they voyage into eternity; Beckett’s tramps; Faulkner’s devotion to the word endure—to suffer patiently, to continue to exist. All these writers, who we think are looking toward us into the present, are actually gazing back.

  From that perspective it is as if the forward thrust of narrative, as if the very action of verbs, is illusory, that no matter what the story or how it’s told or by whom, the inescapable conclusion is that life—not just life on the page but life at its core—waits. It waits stalled in traffic, doing time at red lights, waits in line for the coffee that signals the beginning of another day, waits for the messages of the day to arrive. Sometimes the wait is imperceptible, but it can also seem interminable—waiting for a phone call from a lover or from the doctor who may pause before delivering what feels more like a sentence than a diagnosis, the kind of call in which the undecided seems suddenly to have been decided long before, as if it’s no accident that in the mystical, kabbalistic workings of language, fate and wait are paired in rhyme.

  I don’t remember if that essay on waiting mentioned Ketchum, Idaho, on the morning of July 2, 1961. It didn’t have to. Whether a public gesture such as Yukio Mishima’s seppuku, or a private exit—Virginia Woolf, her pockets filled with stones, sinking into the River Ouse—a writer’s suicide becomes the climax of a reality that the reader appends to a lifework of fiction. It has certainly become the final punctuation for Hemingway, an author who traded the typewriter he referred to as his psychoanalyst for a shotgun. Playing analyst, literary critics wrote that his suicide had been lying in wait since 1928 when Hemingway’s father, Clarence, a doctor, shot himself at the family home in Oak Park, Illinois, with a Civil War pistol passed down from his father.

  In “Indian Camp,” an early story, the father, a doctor, while on a fishing trip to Michigan, performs a C-section with a jackknife and tapered gut leaders on an Indian woman who has been in labor for two days. The story is set not all that far from where I rented that cottage up in Michigan, although any trace of Native Americans, Ojibwa probably, is gone. The Indian woman’s husband can’t endure the suffering and cuts his own throat. Afterward, Nick, the boy who has witnessed both the birth and the suicide, asks his father, “Is dying hard, Daddy?”

  “No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”

  The story ends: In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure he would never die.

  * * *

  The woman, Liesel—she went by Lise—who wanted to know where on my body I would choose a wound to bind, despised Hemingway. She despised the popular legends about him and the values they represented, despised bullfights and braggarts who spent their considerable disposable income on shooting animals in Africa, despised what she called the Arrested He-Man School of American Fiction. When I suggested that Hemingway deserved his unfashionable reputation, but still, he had written some genuinely original stories that continued to influence writers even if they didn’t acknowledge it, Lise told me she preferred stories that reached for a transformative epiphany to those that settled for irony. I don’t know how much of Hemingway’s work she’d actually read. She revered Dawn Powell, a writer who like Lise had fled a small town in central Ohio for the city. I recall a conversation we had that prompted me to say that Hemingway had referred to Powell as his favorite living writer, and there was another time, on the night we met, when I quoted a Hemingway phrase about how grappa took the enamel off your teeth and left it on the roof of your mouth, and she laughed. Otherwise Hemingway wasn’t a writer we discussed much, let alone argued about. I wasn’t going to defend a guy rich enough for safari vacations beating his chest for shooting the last of the lions.

  Lise took her literature seriously, although she’d probably say not seriously enough. She was a self-described ABD—All But Dissertation—initials she likened to those indicating a disease, or a social stigma like a welfare mother on ADC. She was kidding, but before I caught myself, the comparison between an ADC mother and an ABD from the University of Chicago reminded me of the lack of proportion in those few poems by Sylvia Plath that used Holocaust imagery to convey the pain of a young woman from Smith.

  “Actually, ABD is a minor epidemic at the U of C,” Lise said. “There should be a graveyard in old Stagg Stadium, not under the stands where the atom bomb was hatched, but right out on the playing field where Jay Berwanger dodged tackles, little crosses marking all the dissertations that suffered and died there.”

  Her unfinished dissertation was titled One City, One Love: Endless Becoming in the Work of Dawn Powell. Its three-hundred-plus
pages awaited completion behind a closed door in a sewing room she called Limbo in the apartment she rented over a dry cleaner in Hyde Park. To pay the rent, Lise augmented a small trust fund by teaching freshman comp at a couple of community colleges in the Chicago area. One was near Arlington, and sometimes, when I’d drive in from Michigan to see her, we’d meet at the Thoroughbred track there. Our first time at the races we won big—for us, anyway—$687 on a horse we couldn’t not bet on named Epiphany. The following night at a French restaurant overlooking an illuminated Lake Shore Drive, we blew our winnings on a four-course meal washed down with a magnum of a champagne from a village fittingly called Bouzy. After the waiter had ceremoniously buried the empty bottle neck-down in the ice bucket, Lise said, “You have to promise we’ll run away to Bouzy together.” She pronounced it boozy.

  “Tonight?” I asked, checking my watch.

  “Tonight’s too late, Jack. It’s already tomorrow in France,” she said, and then, leaning in to be kissed, knocked over the flute with the last of her wine.

  Lise was a self-described “promiscuous kisser,” though that didn’t keep her from regarding a kiss as deeply intimate—especially, she added, if it’s my tits being kissed. After a few drinks, she had a way of releasing from a kiss with her mouth still open, shaped as if the kiss continued, a facial expression that her good looks allowed her to get away with, as they allowed her to get away with sounding a little breathless on the subject of sex. The restaurant was closing, the chefs, sans toques, leaned in the doorway of the kitchen, drinking red wine and watching what Lise called our PDAs. We joked that night about calling it quits as high rollers while we were ahead, but over the racing season we returned to the track in Arlington hoping for another score. This time we’d invest in tickets to Bouzy.

  We’d been drinking the night we first met, too, though it was pitchers of Rolling Rock, not champagne. I’d driven into Chicago for a reading and book signing by a friend who’d been a teacher of mine when I was in a graduate program in American studies there. After his reading, a small group, Lise among them, adjourned to a Hyde Park neighborhood pub. I’d noticed her in the audience at the bookstore. It was bitterly cold, and I’d taken a chance driving in but thought I could make it back to Michigan before the predicted lake-effect snow. She was wearing a furry Russian hat à la Doctor Zhivago that accentuated her cheekbones and the green of her eyes. There should be a word for a flair for looking stylish in hats. For Lise that included baseball caps, bathing caps, rain hoods, bicycle helmets, headbands, and probably tiaras and babushkas—anything that swept her hair up and bared her delicate face. Tendrils of auburn hair kept straggling out from under the fur hat and she’d tuck them back with the unconscious self-consciousness of a girl tugging up her swimsuit.

  Later, when we’d tell each other the story of how we met, the word we’d use was effortless. We found ourselves seated directly across the table from each other in the pub and discussing our mutual friend’s new book. Then, looking for things in common, we went on to talking about books that had changed us, movies that had swept us away, music we loved, food, travel, all the while refilling each other’s beer steins, until inevitably we reached the subject of our personal lives.

  Lise brought it up in the spirit of recounting what changed her, what had swept her away. I hadn’t drunk anywhere near enough to tell her about the ill-advised relationship I’d had after I’d quit my job as a city caseworker, with a woman named Felice, who had once been on my caseload. She’d managed to get off welfare by working as a cocktail waitress in a mob bar. Her dream was to go to law school. At the time we met, her daughter, Starla, was in remission from leukemia. When the disease returned, Felice turned to drugs. We’d go together to the children’s wing of County Hospital to read to Starla. She loved stories about cats, especially a series about Jenny Linsky, a black cat who wore a red scarf. I bought Starla a red scarf she took to wearing, which was as close as we could get to bringing her the cat that Felice was determined to sneak into the hospital. Starla’s death after months of wasting away left Felice inconsolable. It wasn’t numbness or escape she was after; she wanted to hurt herself, and I couldn’t find a way to help her. Talking about her like that sounded wrong, though—psychologized, abstracted, factual, but also censored, sanitized, and less than honest. I didn’t know how to tell what had happened, even to myself, and felt too guilty to try. After Felice disappeared, I had lucked into a teaching job in Michigan on the strength of my newly published first book. A few threatening letters from Felice were forwarded to me—letters threatening herself. They arrived with a Chicago postmark but no return address. I never knew where she was living or with whom, and felt braced for worse to come. That night in the pub with Lise, back in the city from which I felt exiled, was the first time in a long while that it seemed natural to share a drink with a woman. When Lise asked me directly, I simply told her I wasn’t seeing anyone.

  Lise said that she was involved, off and on, with an older man who was a collector.

  “A what?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Whenever I say what Rey does, people do a double take.”

  “Tax collector? Butterfly collector? Juice loan collector?”

  “An everything and anything collector. He’s got a great eye! That’s the name of his business: Great Eye Enterprises. He has this talent for stuff. This stein—he could give you a disquisition on beer steins that would make you have to have a set of them. It’s sexy. He’s sexy. It’s partly smell—I don’t think anything indicates sexual attraction more than smell. It’s the sense most directly linked with memory. With Rey it was love at first sniff. The first time I met him, I literally started to tremble and had to hide in the Ladies’. Even when we’re apart I keep one of his undershirts in my closet for a fix.”

  “So, is this an off or an on cycle?”

  “Sort of in between. He’s starting a business in Denver. We talk on the phone at least twice a day. There’s so much history between us, and we deserve to be together, but I don’t know. I need my doctorate, and though he gets me, he doesn’t get that. He’s a salesman, not a scholar. He made a half a million dollars last year and wants to support me, but he’s getting tired of waiting. He says he needs a woman in his bed every night, which sounds hot, but he’s major needy, and in the culture he was raised in I’m not sure ‘in his bed’ doesn’t extend to ‘in the kitchen.’”

  “So, how long have you two been involved?”

  “Seven years.”

  The people we’d come in with were bundling up to head out into a blizzard that had howled in ahead of schedule. We hugged our mutual friend goodbye, and it was only Lise and me left at the table when the waitress announced last call. We moved to the bar, looking for something to cap off the evening and clean away the aftertaste of beer. I suggested grappa. “Perfect,” Lise said. But the bar didn’t stock it.

  “How about a couple shots of Drano instead?” the bartender offered.

  Lise said she had a bottle at her place that she’d brought back from Rome, a trip she’d taken with Buck, a paintings conservator, during an off phase with the collector. She’d bought the grappa because it was flavored with rose petals; it took pounds of petals, thousands of roses, to make a single bottle. In Italy, the relationship with Buck had seemed a romantic adventure, but once back in the States she began to suspect that Buck, despite the macho way he dressed—the Wolverine boots and his prized Stetson Gun Club hat that he had worn during their trip to Europe—was gay and didn’t know it. She returned to her ne plus ultra—Rey.

  “Once someone has taken you across a line into the best sex of your life, you can’t go back. It’s not easy for other men to turn my head from Rey,” she said. I didn’t ask what she meant by “across a line,” and I wondered how many other times Rey had been there to collect her yet again.

  The sleety horizontal snow had plastered my wipers to the windshield. Given the alcohol, the hour, and the weather, Lise suggested that rather than find a hotel, le
t alone trying to drive back to Michigan, I sleep on her couch.

  The couch was more about decor than comfort, a quality shared by most of her furnishings. Stuff—chiming clocks, threadbare tapestries, knickknacks, ornate mirrors, and murky oil paintings—crowded her small apartment. The room looked as if it might have a musty resale shop smell. I supposed it was decorated in Great Eye. There was a sense of recycled pasts that brought her phrase “so much history between us” to mind.

  “Like it?” she asked.

  “Very quaint.”

  “Please, the operative term is whimsical. I meant the grappa.”

  “The operative term is thank you, I never tasted anything like it.”

  “So what do you collect?” she asked.

  “What do I collect?”

  “Everyone collects something,” she said. “First editions, baseball cards, saltshakers…”

  “Frankly, since moving to Michigan, I’ve been trying to get rid of shit.”

  I interpreted the alarmed look she gave me to mean that we were on a subject sacred to her, beyond anything in common between us.

  She unrolled an unzipped sleeping bag over the brocade cushions and fluffed a pillow faintly scented by her shampoo against the single fin of the couch. “At least you’ve dared to remove your shoes, or do you always sleep fully dressed?”

  “I forgot to pack my footy pajamas.”

  “Will you be warm enough without them?”

  “If my feet get cold I might need the loan of that fur hat.”

  “It’s been a lovely evening. Thank you. Sweet dreams, Jack,” she said, and tucked the flap of the sleeping bag over me.

  “No peck good night?”

  Amused, she leaned toward me, chastely kissed my forehead, and let me draw her in. Her mouth tasted of rose petals and white lightning. She pulled away, and went about the apartment switching off lights, then, silhouetted against the street glow of the windows, stood as if she might be listening for something. Neither of us spoke—a silence made palpable by ticking gusts of sleet. She was shivering when finally she returned to the couch and slid in beside me under the sleeping bag.